Quotes to inspire and reflect

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

To possess, is past the instant / We achieve the Joy—/ Immortality contented / Were Anomaly.

When we desire or solicit any thing, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.

Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.

One swallow does not make a summer; neither does one fine day.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn’t be so grossly over-populated as it is now.

Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.

The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.

What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.

There must be something good in a thing that pleases so many; even if it cannot be explained, it is certainly enjoyed.

The man with a host of friends who slaps on the back everybody he meets is regarded as the friend of nobody.

In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.

One of the most fascinating aspects of politicianwatching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.

Why is it that when political ammunition runs low, inevitably the rusty artillery of abuse is always wheeled into action?

A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years.

[Wjomen are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers or mindless policy-makers in politics.

If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention.

The future lies with those wise political leaders who realize that the great public is interested more in government than in politics.

[Tjhe state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, postulated what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

There are men who desire power simply for the sake of the happiness it will bring; these belong chiefly to political parties.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

The friend of humanity cannot recognize a distinction between what is political and what is not. There is nothing that is not political.

did you ever / notice that when / a politician / does get an idea / he usually / gets it all wrong.

Political action is the highest responsibility of a citizen.

The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.

Popular men, / They must create strange monsters, and then quell them, / To make their arts seem something.

All of us in the Senate live in an iron lung—the iron lung of politics, and it is no easy task to emerge from that rarified atmosphere in order to breathe the same fresh air our constituents breathe.

Genuine politics—politics worthy of the name, and the only politics I am willing to devote myself to—is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community, and serving those who will come after us.

I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of mankind, and that I could not do unless I took part in politics.

Spare me the sight / of this thankless breed, these politicians / who cringe for favors from a screaming mob / and do not care what harm they do their friends, / providing they can please a crowd!

Persistence in one opinion has never been considered a merit in political leaders.

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

[Political skill] is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month,

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

Politics cannot stop to study psychology. Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

Even more important than winning the election is governing the nation. That is the test of a political party—the acid, final test.

The elephant has a thick skin, a head full of ivory, and as everyone who has seen a circus parade knows, proceeds best by grasping the tail of his predecessor.

Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Poets are not supposed to write epics any longer, despite the fact that the only poets who have endured and will endure are poets who have written epics.

The Poet, gentle creature as he is, / Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times; / His fits when he is neither sick nor well, / Though no distress be near him but his own / Unmanageable thoughts.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.